Challenges from large scale computing at Google

From Greg Linden on a talk Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave last week at University of Washington Computer Science titled "Research Challenges Inspired by Large-Scale Computing at Google" : Coming away from the talk, the biggest points for me were the considerable interest in reducing costs (especially reducing power costs), the suggestion that the Google cluster may eventually contain 10M machines at 1k locations, and the call to action for researchers on distributed systems and databases to think orders of magnitude bigger than they often are, not about running on hundreds of machines in one location, but hundreds of thousands of machines across many locations.